by Bart Schultz
crisis, when Mill came to realize that the Benthamism (as he understood
it) into which he had been born was emotionally flat and lifeless. Clough
was Socratic, and ironic, but his skepticism was matched with that singular
comprehensive sympathy that spoke to the Christian: he was the “agnostic
who couldn’t have cared more, to whom religion was a matter of life or
death.” Tennyson as a poet may have moved Sidgwick more, but his
intellect was not as sharp, his ambivalence not as perfect. Clough bet-
ter represented Sidgwick’s “individual habits of thought and sentiment”
(M ).
“He clings to the ‘beauty of his dreams;’ but – two and two make four” –
that is, what Sidgwick loved in Clough was
the painfulness, and yet inevitableness of this conflict, the childlike simplicity and submissiveness with which he yields himself up to it; the patient tenacity with
which he refuses to quit his hold of any of the conflicting elements; the consistency with which it is carried into every department of life; the strange mixture of sympathy and want of sympathy with his fellow-creatures that necessarily accompanies
it. (MEA )
Clough was truly philosophical in his “horror of illusions and deceptions
of all kinds” and his “passionate devotion not to search after truth, but to
truth itself – absolute, exact truth.” His skill
lay in balancing assertions, comparing points of view, sifting gold from dross
in the intellectual products presented to him, rejecting the rhetorical, defining
the vague, paring away the exaggerative, reducing theory and argument to their
simplest form, their ‘lowest terms.’ ‘Lumen siccum,’ as he calls it in one of his
poems, is the object of his painful search, his eager hope, his anxious loyalty.
(MEA )
Here, then, was one who could truly speak to the depths of an
Apostolic soul. The expression “lumen siccum” became a permanent fixture
of Sidgwick’s vocabulary.
The truth is – if Clough had not lived and written, I should probably be now exactly
where he was. I have not solved in any way the Gordian Knot which he fingered.
I can neither adequately rationalise faith, nor reconcile faith and reason, nor
suppress reason. But this is just the benefit of an utterly veracious man like Clough, that it is impossible for any one, however sympathetic, to remain where he was. He
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exposes the ragged edges of himself. One sees that in an irreligious age one must
not let oneself drift, or else the rational element of oneself is disproportionately
expressed and developed by the influence of environment, and one loses fidelity
to one’s true self. (M )
One’s “true self ” – for Sidgwick this was of course the issue, and his was
a theistic one, longing for a friendly universe, a Heart and Mind behind
phenomena. Clough, he felt, was “in a very literal sense before his age.”
His “point of view and habit of mind” were “less singular in England
in the year than they were in , and much less than they were
in .” Clough, not Wordsworth or Arnold, was the prophet of their
culture, someone who understood how
We are growing year by year more introspective and self-conscious: the current
philosophy leads us to a close, patient, and impartial observation and analysis of
our mental processes: and the current philosophy is partly the effect and partly
the cause of a more widespread tendency. We are growing at the same time more
unreserved and unveiled in our expression: in conversations, in journals and books,
we more and more say and write what we actually do think and feel, and not what
we intend to think or should desire to feel. We are growing also more sceptical
in the proper sense of the word: we suspend our judgment much more than our
predecessors, and much more contentedly: we see that there are many sides to
many questions: the opinions that we do hold we hold if not more loosely, at
least more at arm’s length: we can imagine how they appear to others, and can
conceive ourselves not holding them. We are losing in faith and confidence: if we
are not failing in hope, our hopes at least are becoming more indefinite; and we
are gaining in impartiality and comprehensiveness of sympathy. In each of these
respects, Clough, if he were still alive, would find himself gradually more and
more at home in the changing world. (MEA )
This was a mind in which Sidgwick could find himself: bearing witness
to the true self, scrupulously pursuing truth, saying what you believe,
growing more comprehensive in sympathy and impartiality. Clough’s
world had been indulgent of pious deception and hypocrisy. But not
Clough. “Lax subscription to articles,” Sidgwick observed, “was the way
of Clough’s world: and it belonged to his balanced temper to follow the
way of his world for a time, not approving, but provisionally submitting
and experimentalising.” To do this, following the way of the world “till
its unsatisfactoriness has been thoroughly proved” and then “suddenly to
refuse to do it any longer,” was neither heroic nor pleasant, but “as a via
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media between fanaticism and worldliness, it would naturally commend
itself to a mind like Clough’s” (MEA ). And, to be sure, to a mind like
Sidgwick’s. All of his poetic friends – Noel and Symonds, for example –
recognized that this was “Sidgwick’s poet.”
For Sidgwick had followed Clough’s example. He had provisionally
submitted for quite some time. As early as , he could write to Browning
that
I see that there is a great gulf between my views and the views once held by those
who framed the Articles: and now held by at least a portion of the Church of
England; I think I could juggle myself into signing the Articles as well as any one
else: but I really feel that it may at least be the duty of some – if so – to avoid the best-motivated perjury. (M )
And again, Mayor had advised him in that “when the views that were
at present negative became positive in me, I ought to resign, not till then”
(M ). In the aftermath of his immersion in historical biblical studies,
this was precisely what happened.
VII. Fully Persuaded in His Own Mind
During most of his adult life Sidgwick had some text – a different one at different
periods – which ran in his head, representing the keynote, so to speak, of his
thought about his own life. From about to about the text was, “After
the way which they call heresy, so worship I the God o
f my fathers.” From about
to October it was, “Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus,
better than all the waters of Israel? may I not wash in them, and be clean? . . . And his servants . . . said, My father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it?” From October to about the text
was, “Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.” From about to
about , “But this one thing I do, forgetting those things that are behind, and
stretching forth unto those that are before, I press towards the mark.” And finally
from about , “Gather up the fragments that are left, that nothing be lost.”
Memoir, p.
Matthew Arnold might have taken a certain satisfaction in knowing
how utterly Sidgwick adored Clough. For it was Arnold who argued that
religion had become culture, and culture had become poetry – the wars
of religion were soon to be culture wars. Sidgwick’s rejoinder would have
been that with Clough, poetry had become philosophy, at least in some
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degree. But in any event, both Sidgwick and Arnold appreciated the need
for some sort of clerisy, some vanguard of genuine educators, to teach the
public the Socratic method and the merits of Clough and to blow away all
the “semi-hypocrisy” poisoning the air.
Clough set him a rather stern example, the more so since Clough’s res-
ignation, like Maurice’s, took place at a time when such an act carried the
very real risk of an extreme diminution of one’s prospects. By Sidgwick’s
day, change was in the air; even the self-promoting littérateur Leslie
Stephen, a star of the intellectual aristocracy but no one’s model of moral
courage, had resigned, claiming that he could not believe in the Universal
Flood. The prospect of being Saint Lawrence on “a cold grid-iron,” as
C. D. Broad wittily remarked, must have made Sidgwick all the more
miserable, all the more apt to regard himself as a failure in the practical
sphere.
Stephen did, however, give what was probably a nastily accurate picture
of the situation:
The average Cambridge don of my day was (as I thought and think) a sensible and
honest man who wished to be both rational and Christian. He was rational enough
to see that the old orthodox position was untenable. He did not believe in Hell,
or in ‘verbal inspiration’ or the ‘real presence.’ He thought that the controversies
upon such matters were silly and antiquated, and spoke of them with indifference,
if not with contempt. But he also thought that religious belief of some kind was
necessary or valuable, and considered himself to be a genuine believer. He assumed
that somehow or other the old dogmas could be explained away or ‘rationalised’
or ‘spiritualised.’ He could accept them in some sense or other, but did not ask too
closely in what sense. Still less did he go into ultimate questions of philosophy.
He shut his eyes to the great difficulties or took the answer for granted.
This was exactly what a Cloughian could not do.
It is perhaps suggestive of Sidgwick’s vacillating views during the sixties
that he could announce to Dakyns in that he had “finally parted from
Mill and Comte – not without tears and wailings and cuttings of the hair,”
and that he was an “eclectic” who believed in the “possibility of pursuing
conflicting methods of mental philosophy side by side” (M ), and then,
within the space of a year, write directly to Mill, for the first time, asking his
advice about subscription because “there is no one living whose opinion
would be more valuable to me and to many others than yours” (CWC).
On the whole, of course, the latter sentiment was the more reliable, and
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therefore, it is all the more indicative of the importance of the subscription
issue to Sidgwick that he should choose to write to Mill about this matter,
above all others.
As Sidgwick puts it, in a letter dated July , , the “subject is the
position which liberals (speculatively I mean, “Aufgehlärte” of various
shades) ought to take-up with regard to the traditional (in England the
established) religion of the country.” Sidgwick actually introduces himself
as a “Cambridge Liberal,” who had been urged to write to Mill by Professor
Fawcett, and explains that he has a personal interest in the question, though
it is also of “great social importance.” The subject is also one, Sidgwick
complains, on which it is “next to impossible to obtain a full and open
discussion on generally accepted principles,” though he would like to
solve it “on principles of pure ethics, without any reference to the truth or
falsity of any particular religion.” This admittedly poses some difficulty,
since the “orthodox cannot be brought to give any other answer than that a
man should believe the truth.” Sidgwick also desires “to solve it according
to principles of objective, social (‘utilitarian’) morality,” especially since
the majority of unprejudiced persons with whom I have broached the subject are
satisfied to say that a man ought to act according to his conscience: whereas to me
there seems to be just the same futility in referring an individual to his subjective standard, the resultant of his moral instincts and habits, on this, as on any other
question of social duty.
To ask that the problem be solved may, of course, be asking too much,
and Sidgwick will be happy enough if matters get more fully argued out
and there is at least a clearer line between “expedient conformity and
inexpedient hypocrisy.”
Put more precisely, the problem concerns the varying degrees of con-
formity expected of clergymen or “actual teachers of religion,” all other
persons “who have taken definite religious tests,” the general run of edu-
cators “at schools or universities belonging to particular churches whose
professional career depends upon their being believed to adhere more or
less stringently to a certain creed,” and finally, “persons who simply take
part in a form of worship.” There are, Sidgwick observes, people in all of
these classes in the Church of England “who do not believe in the distinc-
tive (what would be generally called the fundamental) doctrines of that
Church – but who still, from other than selfish motives, conform and con-
ceal their opinions.” The arguments on their behalf are manifold: more
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or less unbelieving clergymen may believe that “they are having a better
influence on their flocks” than their orthodox counterparts. On the other
side, more rigorist clergy may insist that their flocks should believe the
prayers and creeds every bit as wholly and sincerely as they do. The related
legal arguments do not actually solve anything, as long as the moral ones
remain so unclear – for instance, what it would be honorable for someone
not subject to legal punishment to do.
Sidgwick identified himself as being in the second group, of those who
have taken definite tests, and he asked Mill to discuss the issue personally,
or at least to read a statement of his on it, if possible. Mill in turn declined
the invitation to meet personally, but he was generous and encouraging,
and agreed to read Sidgwick’s longer statement of the problem. That
would of course turn out to be a draft of the pamphlet on “The Ethics of
Conformity and Subscription,” Sidgwick’s prelude to the Methods. As in
the case of his essays on Arnold, Sidgwick bracketed his life with works
on this subject; two of the central contributions to Practical Ethics, the
last book he published during his lifetime, returned to it, and this in itself
might indicate the inestimable importance of this theme in his life.
When the first pamphlet finally appeared in print, in , it was rather
after the fact, and after a good deal of Sidgwickian agitation. In and
there had been a movement for various university reforms, including
“a proposal to omit the words in the oath sworn by fellows on their election,
promising conformity to the Church of England” (M ). Sidgwick and
J. Lamprière Hammond had been among the ringleaders, but their efforts
were defeated at the annual meeting in December of . Consequently,
in June of , Sidgwick at last resigned his assistant tutorship and his
Fellowship, writing to his mother that “[w]hatever happens I am happy
and know that I have done what was right. In fact, though I had some
struggle before doing it, it now appears not the least bit of sacrifice, but